Over the last several months the strife of the Rohingya people of North West Burma (Myanmar) has been a forté of the western news media. While this has clearly done much good in bringing attention to the ethnic cleansing going on in Rakhine state too often many of Rohingya in the worst situation are ignored with the violence in Burma (Myanmar) portrayed as simply Rakhine Buddhists persecuting Muslim Rohingya.
The Rohingya are a people who migrated into the region that is now Rakhine state in Burma (Myanmar) from what is now Bangladesh and the western Indian states from the 15th to the 18th century. There has been a long history of ethnic violence between the Rohingya and other people living in Burma (Myanmar) particularly the Rakhine and Bamar peoples. This started as early as the time of the Burmese Konbaung Dynasty in the 18th century and has been continuing on a low level for over two hundred years and accelerating in 2012 after decades of ethno-religious tension exploded into riots that killed dozens of Rohinga Muslims.
This is where the problem began where the conflict in Rakhine and the plight of the Rohingya has been seen as an exclusively religious matter. In reality the situation is much different, only half of the Muslims in Burma (Myanmar) are Rohingya and yet (while other Muslims groups are still badly treated) the treatment of the Rohingya is distinct and vastly worse than those of other Burmese Muslims. The reason is that the persecution of the Rohingya is as much ethnic as it is religious. Burma (Myanmar) recognises 135 ethnic groups in 8 “races” and bases citizenship on this, the problem is that this leaves many groups such as Burmese Tibetans and Anglo-Burmese without citizenship in Burma (Myanmar) and these disenfranchised groups are often the victims of serious discrimination. The largest group without citizenship are the Rohingya which successive Burmese governments have attempted to portray as Bengali rather than Burmese.
The problem with adressing this as a purely religious conflict is that while the majority of the Rohingya are Muslim there is also a large Hindu minority of Rohingya who are often in the worst possible situation. In Rakhine state there are around 160,000 Hindus, most of which are Rohingya. Due to the news media focusing soley on the Muslims majority of the Rohingya who are Muslims (around 1 million in Rakhine state) the Hindus are ignored meaning they have less access to charitable donations (many of the charities are exclusively Muslims and while these are not necessarily religiously bigoted and are usually well meaning when money is distributed through a religious structure it tends to go to followers of that religion). Furthermore even the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has played into this by pushing the cause of the Rohingya and distributing aid to exclusively Muslim Rohingya (although some aid may well have ended up with Hindus). The other problems are that the Rohingya Hindus do not just face violence from the Rakine people and the Burmese government but instead also from the Rohingya Muslims. While many Hindus have been accused of participation in the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) which is an organisation that has been accused of using terrorist tactics (although not officially listed by most western countries as a terrorist organisation) ARSA has also carried out attacks on the Hindu Rohingya.
Over 100,000 mostly Muslim Rohingya have fled into Bangladesh since August 25th (this article being written on the 12th of September) and they have faced fairly substantial bigotry themselves with elements of the Bangladeshi government calling for the expulsion of the nearly 700,000 Rohingya in Bangladesh and many refugees fleeing the Burmese army and Buddhist militias being forcibly turned round at the Bangladeshi border. However the Hindus are again treated worse with Bangladesh already having around 12 million Hindus making up about 9% of the population already facing serious discrimination.
The point of this piece is not to say we should ignore the persecution of Muslims in Rakhine but that understanding it purely as a religious issue and not as an ethnic conflict with a religious aspect will lead to both a misunderstanding of the general situation and potentially greater issues where the plight of a substantial population of the Rohingya is ignored.
The Optimistic Outlook 